ABSTRACT
My task is to write the story behind the conceptual development in my 1992 ethnography, The Battered Woman and Shelters. The story genre will be a mystery because ethnography is detective work, the process of piecing together clues about the underlying meaning of the buzzing confusion of practical experience. This makes my character a sociological detective attempting to solve the mystery of how workers at the “South Coast” shelter understood the characteristics, problems, and needs of women residing there. I will attempt to show how the mysteries of shelter work presented themselves to me, and how clues solving one mystery did nothing to solve others. I will continue with how my findings from this research have led me to explore several more general questions about social life, and I will close with some reflections on doing this research. Because both ethnographers and mystery writers know that story plots and characters make sense only within context, that is where my story begins.
My story starts in the late 1970s when I had finished my third year in a Ph.D. program and was offered a job on a grant to evaluate the newly formed Family Violence Program (FVP). As one of the first publicly supported programs in the United States to respond to the perplexing problems of wife abuse, the primary goal of the FVP was to develop models for changing criminal justice procedures for this newly defined crime. A minor element in the FVP was the South Coast shelter, which, on-the-record, was merely a resource for police: the police would arrest abusive men, the shelter would take care of the women. Although my formal job as program evaluator most often took me to the district attorney’s office, the courts, and police station, I went to the shelter to interview workers about their activities and to tally statistics from the forms women completed when they entered as new residents.
